


Turn to Dust

by shosty



Series: To Build a Home [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Agni Kai (Avatar), Assassination Attempt(s), Can be read as a stand alone, Firelord Zuko (Avatar), Gen, Hurt No Comfort, I wrote this instead of sleeping and I'm sorry, Ozai (Avatar) Being a Terrible Parent, Politics, Post-Canon, Post-War, Zuko is trying his best, hand waving canon because fuck it, no beta we die like jet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28986384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shosty/pseuds/shosty
Summary: Never mind that he won’t be of age for another year-and-then-some. Never mind that he’s sixteen with bandages still wrapped around his chest and a more intimate knowledge of war than these men will ever have. He wasn’t old enough for his first Agni Kai. He isn’t old enough for the crown. No one batted an eye then, they don’t now. The prayer shawl is a familiar weight on his shoulders.(Youth is no excuse, the generals hiss to one another.You will learn respect, a palm of flames says.)
Relationships: Fire Nation Citizen(s) & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: To Build a Home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2130585
Comments: 46
Kudos: 566





	Turn to Dust

**Author's Note:**

> me, projecting my inability to cope with a-levels onto Zuko in 2021?? it’s more likely than you think lol. also it's been a hot second since I last rewatched atla so bare with me if some of the details are a bit,,, sketchy. this is kind of messy, but here have it anyway <3

The war is over, and it should be a relief.

Zuko is crowned under Agni’s first rays in a shortened ceremony because his muscles are still shaking from the strain of lightning coursing through his veins, undirected and vicious. The few remaining Fire Sages give their blessing. He’s sixteen-nearly-seventeen and they’re throwing him to the vultures because it is either that or more war and everyone is so _tired_ of war. 

(Zuko won’t beg Uncle to take it, not when the Earth Kingdom has a long memory, not when he’s finally happy with his life in Ba Sing Se. He took the past three years of Uncle’s life from him. He can’t take this too. He _won’t_.) 

So, he walks into the first war council as Firelord with his hair scraped up into the mockery of a topknot and his robes pressed and clean. He’s all dressed up, ready for the slaughter, the crown catching gold in the sunlight. He feels like a child playing at ruling when the vultures turn cold eyes on him, mouths set in hard lines. 

The war is over. It’s his first act as Firelord, because the war has already lasted one hundred years too long. The world is tired of war, but his war council is not. The generals simmer with untempered fury, because victory to them is the world set aflame, fire eternal and _superior_. 

“I challenge you to an Angi Kai!” General Bujing erupts and Zuko was _expecting_ this, he knew what was coming, but he’d hoped-

It doesn’t matter what he’d hoped. He knows what these men are like, what they have to be like to sit on Ozai’s council, but he can’t replace the council in one sweep while their soldiers are still scattered across the continents. Zuko had expected the fallout. He had expected the flames. He accepts. 

(He was supposed to fight Bujing once, and now he finally has his chance.)

Never mind that he won’t be of age for another year-and-then-some. Never mind that he’s sixteen with bandages still wrapped around his chest and a more intimate knowledge of war than these men will ever have. He wasn’t old enough for his first Agni Kai. He isn’t old enough for the crown. No one batted an eye then, they don’t now. The prayer shawl is a familiar weight on his shoulders. 

( _Youth is no excuse,_ the generals hiss to one another.

 _You will learn respect,_ a palm of flames says.) 

The terms are fight until first burn. General Bujing does not win. 

(There is no space for failure, not now, not with everyone’s eyes on him, not with a nation watching and waiting for him to slip up. He burnt once for a crowd. Never again.) 

It’s over and the crowd cheers for him because that’s what they’re supposed to do, and it rings in his ears as he stalks out the chamber and fights down the urge to vomit all over the marble floors. Zuko wonders if they cheered when he was thirteen. He doesn’t remember. (He doesn’t _want_ to.)

One challenge opens the floodgates. _I challenge you to an Agni Kai_ , a general says, followed instantly by _I accept_. It’s almost routine. They never win because it’s not about who is the victor in the Agni Kai. It’s about the war because that’s what everything is about these days and Zuko cannot afford to lose.

 _Two, three, four, five challenges_. There’s a brief reprise when he spends a week doing his paperwork while curled around a bucket because an assassin finally manages slip poison into his drink. It’s not enough to kill him but he’s _too hot- too cold- shaking- nauseous-_

(“My Lord, you need to rest,” the healer begs multiple times a day as Zuko sends for files and correspondences. She never would have _dared_ with Ozai, but Ozai would never have been poisoned in the first place.

“I think that’s treason,” Zuko says absently, before promptly emptying his guts into the bucket again. The healer forces him to drink more tea. She doesn’t even flinch at the empty threat.)

He gets better and the challenges resume. As soon as they’re over, he rips off the armbands and forces the shaking from his hands as he walks away. He stamps down on the unfairness of it all- that Sokka and Suki got to go home, that Aang and Katara are free to travel the world, that Toph is doing whatever the hell she wants, while he’s _here_ where the war doesn’t feel over so much as it is _postponed_. If he’d asked, they would have stayed, but he didn’t, because he can’t pin his problems on them, just look he couldn’t pin them on Uncle. It’s his crown. It’s his _job_ to deal with it.

Zuko goes back to his office and works until Agni dips below the horizon because his desk is stacked high with letters that demand _reparations, reparations, reparations_. They want guilt clauses, they want money, they want food and resources that he doesn’t can’t possibly have. Their terms are a _mockery_. An _insult_.

They say _if you know what’s good for you, you’ll let us strip your people down to the bone._

They say _stop acting like a child and feed your country to the vultures._

(If he was Ozai, if he was Azula, they never would have dared, but neither of them would have ended the war in the first place. It’s a burden of his own making and now he has to deal with the fallout.) 

His friends put the crown on his head and the genocide too. There’s no money to rebuild a population, there’s no words to make it better, nothing he can do to appease the never-ending anger. People are angry and they’re _right_ to be, but he’s not-even-seventeen and trying to carry to guilt of one hundred years of atrocities. 

(Zuko tries not to hate his friends for putting a crown on his head and _leaving_ , because they hated him once before. Hating him again would be easy. He thinks of his father, flameless and _cold_ left to rot in a cell, and tries not to shiver. If he gets this wrong, he wonders if Aang will take his bending too or if he’d rather just die instead.

 _Aang wouldn’t do that,_ the rational part of his mind argues. _You’re his friend_. _He forgave you; they all did._

But if Zuko was really their friend, they wouldn’t have left, would they? They left, because everyone does. Spirits, even Uncle didn’t stay. He should have asked for them to stay, for _someone_ to stay, because there’s no one for him to turn to and no one for his to trust in this Agni forsaken palace.) 

_This is what the world needs_ , he tells himself, staring at the letters that spit vitriol like rat-vipers. They need a figurehead, a scapegoat, someone to take the blame. He’s got his predecessors cruelty written on his skin and the weight of their sins on his head. 

He’s always been an excellent target. 

(Zuko had been Firelord for less than a day when the first assassin aimed an arrow at his heart. His reign had almost been shorter than Azula’s. It would have been were it not for the fact that Zuko was _very_ good at dodging arrows after the Pohuai Stronghold.)

“These are the reparations we owe the Southern Water Tribe for the raids,” Zuko says to his minister of finance at their next meeting. His eyes are swimming with numbers from a sleepless night, calculating again and again just to be _sure_.

The man stares at the scroll for a minute and then two in tense silence. His fingers curl so tightly around the paper that it crumples in his grasp. When he speaks, his voice trembles with rage.

“We don’t _owe_ them anything,” he snarls. “I challenge you to an Agni Kai.”

Zuko accepts. The minister does not win. 

(It’s closer than Zuko cares to admit.) 

The crown grows heavy. 

Vultures circle. 


End file.
